Paulo Gabriel
Lorien
Feb 23 2021, 9:34am
Views: 1914
|
Again from an online ranter:
''But this problem of tone is endemic. And gets worse. It is embodied in the casting of the film, written out in the script treatment, and played through in the acting of the scenes. The failure is one of that quality which in German is called edel, which comes from the same root as the AS word aetheling and means both noble in the sense of aristocratic heritage, and in the greater sense from which that nobility derives: Edelsinn, generosity of thought - all that is, to use the words JRRT himself used talking of the aims of his writing, high, lofty, not base nor coarse, ennobling - a contrast of noble not so much to common as to crude, though also indicating a rising above the mundane and drab and especially petty and foolish and cruel.
It is this edel quality which characterizes and distinguishes LOTR from all other sword-and-sorcery tales, primarily, beyond any details of setting or plot. The ones which rip off the most from LOTR are the ones which fail the worst to emulate it, generally: the Generic Fantasy land of decades' worth of RPGs and series novels may have Elves and Halflings and Dwarves and Rangers, but there is no high-mindedness which infuses their realms (the ethos, which spirit is linguistically related to ethics) is simply missing''.
This comment is about the film version of Two Towers. But again I want to ask: is the word Edelsinn mentioned anywhere in the corpus of Tokkien's writings?
(This post was edited by Paulo Gabriel on Feb 23 2021, 9:36am)
|
